Counter-Terrorism Expert Suggests 'Nutrition Labeling' For News Sources During Senate Testimony

Free Speech

from the interesting,-but-doomed-to-fail dept

Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute testified at a Senate Intelligence Committee last week, giving his insight into Russia’s propaganda machine. Like everyone else in Washington, the Senate is trying to determine how much of a role the Russian government might have played in the recent election. An FBI investigation into Trump’s ties with Russia is ongoing.

Watts noted Russia’s attempts to influence American thinking isn’t really new, nor is it solely tied to Trump’s unlikely political success. He points out he began seeing major inroads being made almost three years ago. Here at Techdirt, we noticed the stateside spread of the Russian troll army, confronted directly here by Karl Bode in response to a stream of pro-Russia comments on one of his articles.

Also of concern to many (although in varying degrees) is “fake news.” Much of what’s considered fake news tends to be in the often-partisan eye of the beholder, but a growing network of conspiracy theory sites and news outlets with Russian government ties aren’t helping. Watts states this is simply more the same Cold War tactics by the Russian government, but with the advantage the internet’s built-in instant amplification power.

On the evening of July 30, my colleagues and I watched as RT and Sputnik News simultaneously launched false stories of the U.S. airbase at Incirlik being overrun by terrorists. Within minutes, pro-Russian social-media aggregators and automated bots amplified this false news story and expanded conspiracies asserting American nuclear missiles at the base would be lost to extremists. More than 4,000 tweets in the first 78 minutes after launching of this false story linked back to the Active Measures accounts we’d tracked in the previous two years. These previously identified accounts, almost simultaneously appearing from different geographic locations and communities, amplified this fake news story in unison. The hashtags incrementally pushed by these automated accounts were #Nuclear, #Media, #Trump and #Benghazi. The most common words found in English-speaking Twitter user profiles were: God, Military, Trump, Family, Country, Conservative, Christian, America, and Constitution. These accounts and their messages clearly sought to convince Americans a U.S. military base was being overrun in a terrorist attack like the 2012 assault on the U.S. consulate in Libya. In reality, a small protest gathered outside the Incirlik gate and the increased security at the airbase sought to secure the arrival of the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff the following day.

Watts’ testimony is informative and genuinely interesting. But when it comes to the subject of “fake news,” Watts’ suggestions as to how it might be handled seem a little less grounded in reality. In January, Watts floated the idea of a “Consumer Reports for news:” an independent group made up of members of major social media platforms that would grade new sources for reliability.

The idea was fleshed out a bit in front of the Senate Committee:

Social-media companies should band together in the creation of an Information Consumer Reports. This non-governmental agency would evaluate all media organizations, mainstream and otherwise, across a range of variables producing news ratings representative of the outlet’s accuracy and orientation. The score would appear next to each outlet’s content in web searches and social-media streams providing the equivalent of a nutrition label for information. Consumers would not be restricted from viewing fake news outlets and their erroneous information, but would know the risks of their consumption. The rating, over time, would reduce consumption of Russian disinformation specifically and misinformation collectively, while also placing a check on mainstream media outlets that have all too often regurgitated false stories.

There are a few problems to this approach, starting with it being pitched some sort of private sector “information war” effort — a companion piece to the government’s efforts to combat Russian propaganda. Watts also suggest the State Dept. and DHS both form their own version of Snopes to fact check claims about actions the US government is taking at home and abroad.

The second problem is this won’t solve much, even if it’s able to overcome the resistance of nearly everyone involved. News agencies aren’t going to care much for being graded by platforms that do very little other than drive traffic to them or, in the case of Facebook, find new ways from preventing readers from leaving Facebook.

Facebook, in particular, has been spectacularly bad at handling content that flows through its platform. While it has been more proactive in its attempts to handle abuse and police content than other platforms, it’s also been more error-prone and willing to adjust its ethics to avoid losing traffic and users from countries engaged in censorship.

A grading system can’t be left to algorithms, so it will end up being a representation of graders’ biases, rather than an objective score based on verifiable inputs — in other words, nothing like the “nutrition label but for news” Watts envisions.

Worse, it won’t do anything to overcome readers’ biases. If Facebook, et al hand out a “C-” to Fox News, no one who regularly views Fox News is going to question the trustworthiness of the company’s reporting. Instead, they’ll see the score as untrustworthy: the result of left-leaning social media companies and their hate for anything “conservative.”

The only way this would come about as a concerted effort would be through government direction or legislation. Tying the government to it makes the “independence” of the rating even more questionable, providing another percentage of the population with a reason to distrust the low grades slapped on their favorite news sources.

The fact is readers have to want or care that their new sources are trustworthy. Far too many people don’t and the grades handed out won’t change readers’ minds. It will just give them something new to argue about.

Filed Under: clint watts, fact checking, fake news, nutrition labeling, propaganda